[Python-Dev] tzset (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one@comcast.net
Mon, 17 Mar 2003 16:26:08 -0500

[Stuart Bishop]

Yup. It sucks, but is the best there is. I can't even find proprietary solutions for various Unix flavours. Maybe a post to Slashdot saying Zope 3 will be Windows only due to limitations in POSIX would at least get something for the free distros :-)

[M.-A. Lemburg]

I wonder why we need a TZ-parser then ? If it's non-standard anyway, the module is probably better off outside the core as separate download from e.g. SF.

TZ parsing code hasn't been added to Python, just a wrapper around the platform tzset() function (if any, and for now ignoring the flavor of tzset supplied by Windows). POSIX defines various forms TZ values can take. Some forms have portable meaning across POSIX systems, while others do not.

I hope the community takes up the challenge of building a sane cross-platform time zone facility building on 2.3 datetime's tzinfo objects.

A cross-platform time zone facility isn't a problem - the data we need is available and maintained as part of numerous free Unix distributions. We could even steal C code to decode it if we are particularly lazy.

-1

Why bloat the Python distribution with yet another locale implementation ?

Well, I didn't say anything about the std distribution. Whether there or elsewhere, Python didn't and doesn't have any portable (x-platform) way to deal with time zones. 2.3's tzinfo objects are capable of carrying time zone information in a sane x-platform way, but no concrete tzinfo objects are supplied.